De-corrosion, finally it's the turn of Web3 manufacturers

Author: flowie, ChainCatcher

Web3 manufacturers have finally begun to officially "de-rot".

This morning, Binance reported that employees used their old positions to conduct insider trading and make profits, and those involved have been suspended and may even face legal accountability. Binance's revelations of internal corruption are not new, but this should be the first time that Binance has made public the details of internal trading to "eliminate corruption".

After Binance took the lead in punishing employees for insider trading, exchanges such as Huobi also said they would follow suit. However, compared with the normalisation of Web2 giants' "anti-corruption", the road of "anti-corruption" of Web3 manufacturers has just begun.

Disclose the details of insider trading, and the "anti-corruption" of the currency circle is officially launched?

Judging from the Binance announcement, this de-corruption came from a report two days ago.

The employee involved in this case is the Binance Wallet team, which has recently become popular, and the employee who previously held a business development position at BNB Chain used the information obtained from his previous position to buy a project's tokens in advance, and then quickly sell them after the project announcement, making a lot of money.

In this regard, Binance's handling resulted in the suspension of the employee, and even legal accountability. And the four "whistleblowers" who reported this time were also rewarded with $100,000. Binance also provides an official reporting channel for the community.

However, Binance's employee insider trading may have been publicly exposed by multiple Twitter users long before the official report was received.

Both @pycharts and @BroLeonAus shared on-chain evidence, pointing out that Binance Wallet BD and growth employee Freddie Ng were involved in the rat trap behaviour of $UUU.

@BroLeonAus also sorted out the specific crimes, he said that Freddie Ng should have known in advance that $UUU was going to pull the plate, and used his small address to spend 10 BNB to buy $UUU worth 31.2 W after the low opening, and then all transferred to the washing wallet and sold it at a high price through the Bitget wallet, with the first profit of 181.4 $BNB, worth 110,000 dollars.

In addition, Freddie Ng distributed the remaining $UUU to 8 different addresses, ranging from tens of thousands of dollars to each address. It was discovered by community users because the wallet that the employee bought the rat warehouse was freddieng.bn using a wallet with his real name 121 days ago.

Binance and other exchange employees have been exposed to insider trading with their positions, which is not new. Every time the community is supervised and reported, Binance has also been forced to strengthen its efforts to combat corruption.

In February last year, the sharp fall after RON was listed on Binance also led everyone to question the rat trap, and although Binance responded that it was an oolong, it also took this opportunity to officially declare that it would pay attention to corruption.

There are three main anti-corruption measures mentioned by Binance: strengthening the management of the listing group and fire isolation; For the leakage of project listing information, the listing will also be cancelled; Reward whistleblowers to incentivise public scrutiny.

At the beginning of this year, another author on Medium named Qwertyuiopasdfghj published a public whistleblower letter, directly accusing Binance Labs (now renamed YZi Labs) of major "internal corruption", mentioning that several senior executives of Binance Labs colluded with the invested project parties to transfer benefits.

Although Binance did not conduct a public investigation and publicise the results of this reported incident, it later mentioned after Binance Labs changed its name to Yzi Labs that

the information of Labs' employees is public, and evidence is welcome to be presented, and it can be reported directly to Changpeng Zhao and He Yi.

He Yi also mentioned in Space at the beginning of the year that Binance has conducted more than 120 internal audits in the past two years, fired more than 60 employees for violations, and recovered more than $30 million in illegal income.

However, Binance has not disclosed the details of corruption in the past, and the recent details of insider trading by Binance Wallet team employees may be a signal of Binance's anti-corruption. Under the failure of the wealth effect and the pressure of compliance, public corruption may also be one of the best ways for leading exchanges such as Binance to gain the trust of the community.

Web2 giants have been "decorroding" for more than ten years, what can be learned?

Corruption has always been a difficult disease of large corporations to eradicate. However, compared with the large Web3 companies, the traditional Web2 giants have basically normalised more than ten years after they started the anti-corruption campaign.

Since 2012, when Alibaba set up the group's "Integrity and Compliance Department" to promote internal anti-corruption work, other Internet giants have followed suit and started formal anti-corruption work. Internet giants have some common anti-corruption methods:

supervision, such as the establishment of a special anti-corruption investigation department, the establishment of internal reporting mechanisms, and most of them regularly publish anti-fraud notices。

Jingdong has set up a special fund of 10 million yuan per year to reward individuals and units for violating the rules. Recently, ByteDance announced the company's fraud results report in 2024, detailing the number of employees who were dismissed and handed over to the judicial authorities for processing; Analysis of the types of violations and the key areas involved, such as corruption in procurement, monetisation of technical power and embezzlement, and information black market transactions.

Internet companies will also introduce joint actions and blacklist systems. For example, Tencent, Baidu, Meituan, JD.com and other companies have jointly launched the Sunshine Integrity Alliance, with nearly 800 companies participating in uploading and sharing the list of untrustworthy employees.

In addition, Internet companies use big data, artificial intelligence and other technical means to monitor and analyse internal operations in real time, and detect and deal with fraud in a timely manner. For example, ByteDance has set up a dedicated database from which supervisors can retrieve data, and the system will automatically identify risks and push them to business leaders.

In addition to supervision, internet companies also conduct internal training to educate employees about compliance.

Compared with the Web2 field, Web3 exchanges led by Binance and others involve financial transactions, making it easier for internal employees to have the motivation and means to engage in corruption, and Web3 manufacturers do need to take the lead in normalising and systematising "corruption".